Olympic Stadium view runs on empty

AT THE heart of the controversy over West Ham moving to the Olympic Stadium is envy.

Other sports are eaten up by bitter jealousy about football’s all-consuming popularity.

Other sports begrudge the deluge of media coverage that football earns and lust after the fabulous salaries paid to football’s best practitioners.

It was this covetousness which made Olympic and athletics zealots ignore a football future when the Stratford stadium was commissioned. It was a childish decision and it was calamitous.

And now the same puerile resentment towards football is behind ignorant complaints about the stadium being “given” to West Ham.

So let us talk first, not about football, but about athletics.

Remember how Jessica Ennis, the engaging face of the London Games, led the sad complaints when it was announced that her “home” stadium, Sheffield’s Don Valley, is to be closed?

Although Jess has trained at Don Valley, she does most of her work at the nearby English Institute of Sport Indoor Centre. And the number of times she has competed at Don Valley can be counted on one of her hands.

West Ham's new home ground will be the Olympic Stadium

It is not a practical athletics venue

That is because it is not a practical athletics venue. It was built for the World Student Games in 1991 but since then it has only been full four times for athletics.

It is simply too big. It has only 25,000 seats but that is far too many for athletics.

Jason Henderson, editor of Athletics Weekly, blogged recently: “I remember Kelly Holmes’ farewell meeting there in 2005 and most of the back straight was boarded up to hide the fact spectators weren’t filling those sections. I’ve attended several English Schools Championships at Don Valley and the 2000 teenage competitors resemble ants scuttling around in an arena that is far too cavernous for the occasion and consequently has a poor atmosphere due to its size and number of empty seats.”

So, in recent years, Don Valley has been shunned by athletics. And it is worth looking at what has taken place there, because it gives us a glimpse of what ­Stratford would be like without football.

The organisation who run Don Valley boast that events hosted at their stadium in the last financial year include adidas and McDonalds film shoots, team-building days, psychiatry exams and the National Bonsai exhibition. Sometimes, the truth is beyond parody. Trainee psychiatrists and miniature trees?

Yet the gung-ho fanatics in charge of commissioning the Olympic Stadium in London blindly blundered on, determined to shun football. They erected a stadium for athletics – with 80,000 seats, many of them not covered by the nice-looking but impractical roof. They thought nothing about building temporary Olympic venues for some sports. The £49 million basketball building has gone. The £42m equestrian arena has gone. In all, 140 of the buildings and parts of buildings were completely temporary.

Yet they could not bring themselves to contemplate a main arena which could be swiftly and cheaply reconfigured for football. They refused to admit that only football fills grounds all over the land, week after week, for nine solid months every year.

And now, even when confronted by the escalating cost of their self-indulgent folly, some fanatical fantasists still think West Ham should not be allowed to move in – because the club are getting such a good deal.

Yes, West Ham’s move will be subsidised by the public purse – that’s you and me. But we would have to stump up millions more to keep the stadium going without West Ham.

In Manchester, they put on a fabulous 2002 Commonwealth Games. As planned, they converted the main stadium into a football ground. The warm-up track next door was given a cheap make-over and is still there – an appropriately-sized athletics facility.

Yet in London, they were too envious of football to embrace it. They were like spoilt kids shouting: “Shan’t!” They needed those trainee psychiatrists. But because West Ham are taking a huge punt on a short move, we should be spared the Bonsai exhibitions.